1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to automation of system verification test (SVT) and, more specifically, to extracting information from unstructured textual data obtained from SVT on a System Under Test (SUT).
2. Description of the Related Art
Most systems, whether it is a hardware system or a software system, requires quality assurance (QA) and system verification tests (SVT) before it is released for actual use by the public. It is preferable to automate SVT, so that the SVT process can be carried out efficiently and accurately. Software test automation in many cases requires that a testing program emulate a human interacting with a command-line interface (CLI) via protocols such as telnet, SSH (Secure Shell), or via a serial port. The test program sends a command to a System Under Test (SUT) to perform a configuration step in the test or to extract information from the SUT.
The responses received from the SUT are typically text, formatted in a way intended for human operators to digest. But unlike formats intended for processing by computers (like extensible markup language, XML), these human-readable texts can be complicated for a computer such as a SVT server to “understand” and process. In other words, when a test program on a SVT server needs to use information exposed in the textual responses from the SUT, there is considerable work involved to extract that information, which can be labor-intensive and error-prone. For example, in order to extract such data from text format responses from the SUT, conventional SVT programs use so-called “parsing algorithms” that deconstruct the textual response. Each command of the SVT typically produces a different response format and therefore requires that new parsing software is written to deconstruct or parse that new type of response. Writing such parsing software is labor-intensive and error-prone.
In some conventional cases, “template” approaches have been used to extract data from SVT responses. One can describe a template for a given response structure (perhaps using a general software tool for this purpose) and a more general piece of parsing code uses the template to extract certain data. FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional method of parsing SVT responses from the SUT. The SVT testing system (server) receives 102 an unstructured response. Upon receipt of the unstructured response, a parser appropriate for the type of structured response is selected 104 with a priori knowledge of the format of the unstructured response. A priori knowledge may come, for example, from the fact that the recipient of the response knows the command that was issued to the SUT. The selected parser is used to parse 106 the response and generate test values from the SVT response.
However, such conventional parsing method of FIG. 1 requires a priori knowledge of the format of the unstructured response, which may not always be available. If the format of the response changes from response to response, the existing parsers may not be able to accommodate such changes and parse the response with the changed format. Thus, a new parser will have to be programmed to accommodate such changed format of the SVT response, which is labor-intensive and error-prone.